Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless broadcast systems, tablet computers, smartphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, video teleconferencing devices, set-top devices, and the like. Digital video devices implement video compression techniques, such as those described in standards defined by MPEG-2, MPEG-4, ITU-T H.263, ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), and extensions of such standards.
An encoder-decoder (codec) applies video compression techniques to perform spatial (intra-picture) prediction and/or temporal (inter-picture) prediction to reduce or remove redundancy in video sequences. For block-based video coding, a video slice may be partitioned into video blocks, which may also be referred to as coded treeblocks (CTBs), coding units (CUs) and/or coding nodes. Video blocks in an intra-coded (I) slice of a picture are encoded using spatial prediction with respect to reference samples in neighboring blocks in the same picture. Video blocks in an inter-coded (P or B) slice of a picture may use spatial prediction with respect to reference samples in neighboring blocks in the same picture or temporal prediction with respect to reference samples in other reference pictures.
Spatial or temporal prediction results in a predictive block for a block to be coded. Residual data represents pixel differences between the original block to be coded and the predictive block. An inter-coded block is encoded according to a motion vector that points to a block of reference samples forming the predictive block, and the residual data indicating the difference between the coded block and the predictive block. An intra-coded block is encoded according to an intra-coding mode and the residual data. For further compression, the residual data may be transformed from the spatial domain to a transform domain, resulting in residual transform coefficients, which then may be quantized.
A multi-view coding bitstream may be generated by encoding views, e.g., from multiple perspectives. Multi-view coding may allow a decoder to select different views, or possibly render multiple views. In addition, some three-dimensional (3D) video techniques and standards that have been developed, or are under development, make use of multiview coding aspects. For example, in some 3D video coding processes, different views may be used to transmit left and right eye views to support 3D video. Other 3D video coding processes may use multiview-plus-depth coding. In a multiview-plus-depth coding process, such as a process defined by the 3D-HEVC extension to HEVC, a 3D video bitstream may contain multiple views. Each of the views may include a texture view component and a depth view components. For example, a given view may comprise a texture view component and a depth view component. The texture view and depth view components may be used to construct 3D video data.